Detroit
Schools: The System Now At Ground Zero

by
Rich Gibson July 2011

On
June 20th Michigan’s Republican Governor Rick Snyder joined U.S Education
political boss Arne Duncan and the “Emergency Financial Manager,”
of the Detroit schools, Roy Roberts, appointed in May by Democratic
Governor Granholm, in a press conference to announce a new,
state-wide, “System of Schools.” The System would be initiated in
2012 by combining the worst schools in Detroit, judged by test
scores, and later expand by including the worst schools in the state.

Days
later, on June 25th,
Roberts revealed a school budget plan that demands a 10% pay cut
(around $7,500) from teachers whose Detroit Federation of Teachers’
contract in 2010 already conceded $10,000 a year per teacher and
considerable cut-backs in health benefits. In addition, Roberts
proposed to reduce the total staff by 853 people, this in a city
where unemployment is estimated at more than 50% by the mayor.
Roberts was met by loud protests at his budget unveiling at the
relatively elite Renaissance High School.

In
2010 Duncan, sneering bad boy educator boss to grinning demagogue
Obama’s good fellow full of hope, declared Detroit as “Ground
Zero,” in schooling because, true enough, Detroit schools scored
last in reading, science, and mathematics in national exams in 2010.
The System is yet another turnaround scheme in a city that has been,
rather than turned around, upended again and again. More than 1.2
million people moved out of Detroit since 1970, in part because of
the failing school system.

EFM
Roberts is a 72 year old former boss at the failed General Motors
Corporation, known now in Michigan as Government Motors. Accustomed
to having people do what they’re ordered to do, fast, Roberts
quickly declared that the Detroit Public Schools are in much worse
shape than he initially imagined–and he hasn’t even taken a full
tour. Roberts signed a one year deal, replacing Broad Foundation
trained Robert Bobb. Eli Broad had supplemented Bobb’s salary to
bring it to more than $450,00 a year. EFM Roberts signed on for
nearly $200,000 less.

The
System (note, it’s not a school system but the inverse), as
described by the troika would move full academic responsibility to
individual principals and teachers, devote “95%” of the budget
directly to the classroom. This is all to take effect in 2012. We
shall learn why below.

Celebrity
new-money-bags Eli Broad doubled down with a promise to send every
System graduate to two years of college, amounting to half the
“Kalamazoo promise,” created by more genteel old-money anonymous
benefactors in that city of four years of college to Kalamazoo grads.

Nothing
in the tridents’ assault addresses the factual realities of racist
unemployment and incarceration in Detroit where generations of people
have been unemployed and subsequently jailed for crimes that read
like tails from Les Miserable.

Other
elites like functionaries of the Skillman Foundation join Broad in
their interest in the Detroit schools although Skillman activity goes
back nearly 15 years when one of their agents paid an automotive ad
agency $500,000 to try to convince locals that DPS is a “example of
excellence,” and a good place to send kids. Few people bought that,
or Detroit cars.

In
2010, the city was named, “America’s most dangerous city,” a
title it has held off and on for twenty years. Two-thirds of the
homicides in the city go without investigation–by a police
department so corrupt, for the last 60 years, that federal overseers
were assigned—who were then debased by the then-Mayor Kwame
Kilpatrick (now in prison) who began sleeping with the top fed.

Forty-eight
buildings in the downtown city center stand vacant, not unlike the
rest of Detroit where two-thirds of the buildings, commercial and
residential, are unoccupied, often stripped of all value. Mayor after
mayor has promised to bulldoze 10,000 houses a year, and failed.
Current Mayor Bing (yes, Dave the basketball player) suggests that
citizens be moved to specific areas in order to save money from
providing services, like fire and water, from areas so completely
abandoned that only one or two houses occupy several square blocks.
There is, though, no money to take care of the moves.

Of
this social context, and worse—nothing from the System’s
analysts.

But
the System is announced and, for many citizens, it looks like a
firestorm.

More
bombs dropped on Tuesday, June 22, and Wednesday as well. On Tuesday,
Roberts announced that Eastern Michigan University would run the
System as a turnaround project. And the System becomes and Education
Achievement Authority. Roberts will serve as CEO of the Executive
Committee of an eleven person cabal, two from DPS, two from EMU,
seven appointed by the Governor. The imbalance of votes isn’t even
gently hidden. The internal Executive Committee (five) will appoint a
“Chancellor.”

Odd
thing: many education faculty at EMU, as of June 23, never heard of
the project and many said that if it threatened the Detroit
Federation of Teachers, they would have nothing to do with it. The
question of why Roberts by-passed mid-town Detroit Wayne State
University is unclear. WSU, however, is home to a fairly active
American Federation of Teachers local.

The
Detroit Federation of Teachers bargained what may have been the worst
contract for school workers in history in the last round of talks.
The DFT leadership joined Robert Bobb and American Federation of
Teachers President Randi Weingarten to sell the deal to the rank and
file behind a claim that concessions would save jobs. Concessions, I
argued then, don’t save jobs but only make employers, like sharks
for blood, want more.

That
contract expires in 2012, not coincidentally, the same time the
System comes into play.

When
Roberts announced the Detroit Public Schools 2012 budget, he may have
overestimated his resources. The glitch for Roberts, which he may not
be aware of, is that the budget projects for 66,630 students, down
from an official approximation of 73,000. DPS however, has been
losing about 12,000 students a year. The overly optimistic projection
of a loss of less than 7,000 bodies, attached to funding, is a DPS
habit, but hardly a way for a CEO to count his beans, unless he’s a
modern-day CEO who’s not accountable for anything significant. An
inaccurate count is rather like raising the US budget deficit levels,
using fake debt to pay real debt.

Nobody
can trust figures coming out of the incompetent and corrupt DPS
administration, especially not student count numbers which haven’t
been trustworthy since, at least, 1996 when, I performed an informal
audit. The real figures have been inflated by about 10,000, for
years. If a bona fide audit is performed, the DPS budget deficit, now
officially at $327 million, likely a gross underestimate as well. In
addition, DPS has always counted on student absenteeism to offset
what would be, in “neighborhood schools,” booming class sizes.
Silence about the mythical students who are always absent adds to the
corruptness of the entire system.

It
is unclear what the System of Schools will mean to the Detroit school
board. At least 34 city schools are projected to begin the System,
leaving them out of school board control. The board, however, has
battled the EFM system since its onset, under Governor Granholm, the
Democrat, and recently won, or recovered, control over DPS academics
in court.

Still,
board control is not necessarily the ideal of what most people think
of as elected local control. The board contains a random selection of
citizens who hardly represent the best of the city. One has had his
six children removed from his care by Child Protective Services. In
an election for a board vacancy in early 2011, nobody ran.

The
remaining problems with the “System”:

*This
is the third takeover of one form or another in the last 15 years.
None of them addressed poverty, or the system of capital that
requires, organizes and locates it, and every one of them failed
completely. Rather, they looted DPS of even more resources and, in
most cases, fled town.

*The
System has no plan to shift the current academic programs which
Roberts claims only need to be adjusted. DPS, I note, is Houghton
Mifflin’s favorite client and will, therefore, remain so, kids
tortured by racist high-stakes exams which their birthrights set them
up to fail.

*The
plan to reduce the budget deficit is, in a sense, possessed: DPS will
float more loans, bonds, in order to pay its debts.

*The
superhuman personnel who will implement the plan: who are they? Who
is going to come to Detroit to teach in a System that will likely
wipe out their hopes for job protection before they arrive, that will
pay them less, and put them in a position where those who are deemed
to fail, shaved off piece by piece inevitably as a Duncanesque Race
is run, are Systematized out the door?

There
is room for debate about exactly what this move is. The System is not
New Orleans, nor any of the other models some critics and admirers
have raised together.

In
my view, this is the Corporate State at work, a full blown
partnership of business and government, working almost seamlessly,
but not entirely seamlessly, in order to preserve social control
through a shell game for hope in a volatile city, to gain some bought
and paid for fame (Broad) and perhaps make some bucks (Houghton
Mifflin).

Others
will argue it is privatization.

It
is an important difference as one path, the latter, leads resisters
to want to support the Detroit “Public” Schools which are, in my
eyes, unsupportable and hardly public but completely segregated. Most
of them are engaged in a ballot initiative campaign to abolish EFM’s.
It will not work. Suburban voters like it, an indication of the
outlook of much of the US population—and a problem.

Voting
alone will never take people out of the multi-pronged assaults on the
dispossessed of the US. Let us be clear: the education agenda is a
war agenda, a class war and empire’s war agenda.

The
core issue of our time is the reality of the promise of perpetual war
and escalating inequality met by the potential of a mass, activist,
class conscious movement to transform daily life and to restore
reason itself, connecting it to power that can be sustained, not
betrayed by demagogic politicians.

The
former analysis, solely addressing privatization, leads to much
different conclusions.

The
good reader can speculate.

It
remains, though, that the heads of the Detroit Federation of
Teachers, once a bellwether local in the American Federation of
Teachers, has moved again and again to demoralize school workers, to
foist concessions on people with false promises of saving jobs, and
has done all it can to silence, and expel, serious opposition.

The
likely winner of the last DFT presidential election, what I saw as a
vote fraud, Steve Conn, remains suspended from membership on charges
so preposterous that only the AFT tops could consider them
seriously—as they are following “hearings,” about his
suspension. Results are still pending.

For
all this, DFT president Keith Johnson was named as a “Man of
Excellence,” by the once-proud Michigan Chronicle, now the voice of
the Detroit and area black bourgeoisie.

Many
of the best and most experienced teachers, including those who helped
lead the DFT’s famous wildcat strikes of the last decade, have left
or are leaving DPS.

These
largely unnoticed rank and file educators have, over and again, tried
to reach out to the Michigan Education Association which represents
nearly every other teacher in Michigan but has repeatedly rejected
solidarity action with Detroit. Sheer racism has a lot to do with
this. As a divide and rule ploy, it continues to play well for some,
tragically for most.

While
some connections exist between MEA and DFT members, no formal
alliance of any size has ever been formed, meaning, for MEA, the old
saw, “an injury to one only goes before an injury to all,” came
true in demands for concessions from MEA members, later. On June
30th,
the state legislature moved to strip tenure rights from all Michigan
teachers.

For
DFT members, absence of solidarity with MEA means they fight alone in
a segregated city, just blocks from one of the richest counties in
the United States, suburban mostly white and wealthy Oakland, where,
apparently, few care much about their fate. In this case, unions
like DFT and MEA do more to separate people than unite them.

Elites
however, black and white, on both sides of the notorious 8 Mile Road
divide, Oakland from Detroit, seem to play like Jim Crow allies in
the north and south of the 1950s, each applauding the opportunism of
the other–all promoting a false peace, serenity about still another
fabricated turnaround, as they shield from light harsh levels of
oppression in schools and out.

We
shall see if those who remain with DFT, both those in the schools
targeted for the System’s bombs and their colleagues in other
carved up districts within DPS, Priority Schools vs Neighborhood
Schools for example, can develop the ethics, courage, solidarity, and
organization to fight the organized decay of reason itself in what
was once touted as the finest urban school system in the United
State. Here’s to the rebels.

Rich
Gibson is an emeritus professor at San Diego State University. Rgibson@pipeline.com